Homebrewed Christianity

Impartial love and the rejection of hate

One of my favorite books on postmodern theology is ‘God and Religion in the Postmodern World’ by David Ray Griffin. I should really reread it again and see how it would resonate with me now, but it was the first theology book that helped me the nature of constructive theology in a postmodern context. If you are smart enough to be coming to the Emergent Conversation with Moltmann in a few weeks you can explore this with Philip Clayton and I in our breakout session, ‘Constructive Wine in Deconstructive Wineskins: Finding the Living Spirit in ‘the Death of God.” Any way, Griffin discusses the nature of God’s impartial love and its implications…..

The doctrine of God’s impartial love does not imply that God is not unhappy with much that is going on in the world and does not prefer the actions of some people to those of others. It does not mean that God supports the aims of all indifferently. What this doctrine of God’s impartial love implies is that God’s unhappiness with some people’s lives does not involve hate. It implies that we cannot translate our hatred into divine hatred and thereby justify and reinforce it. It implies that, when we find ourselves fighting against other people, we are fighting against people whom God loves as much as us. It implies that we cannot justify and reinforce our own indifference to some people’s welfare by assuming divine indifference. In brief, it implies that there can be no divine sanction for the typical bipolar, imperialistic viewpoint, which divides the world into the favored saints and the hated enemy, with the rest of the world being a matter of indifference except insofar as it figures into the bipolar battle (p 144).